Casa do Conto
A Fossil Architecture
No. 703 Rua da Boavista represents an archetype of the bourgeois housing plots that consolidated 19th-century Porto. In 2008, the atelier conceived a new concept for a hotel, rehabilitating this house and combining temporary residence with cultural activities. Unfortunately, on 6 March 2009, a few days before the renovated space was due to open, a fire completely destroyed its interior.
As architects and creators of the initial concept, we realised that we had to rebuild this house, if possible, as qualitatively as before. Indeed, the recreation of the remaining structure offered an opportunity to resurrect a small hotel from the ashes of the destroyed building. Consequently, the project evokes the structure and ornament of the pre-existing house using traditional materials and techniques—such as the wooden slats of the partitions or the corrugated cladding sheets—as molds for the new exposed concrete surfaces: the central staircase box; the rear facade; the cubic bathrooms that fill each of the six rooms; and the oval skylight that illuminates the centre of the building.
The result was a kind of "fossil architecture" in which the new concrete surfaces reinforce the memory of the now-disappeared ones. The ceilings were (re)ornamented with texts engraved in low relief (attached to the formwork), in which different narratives about the concept of "house" and this particular one can now be read.
Desenhos Técnicos
Registo de Obra
- Team
- Pedra Líquida
- Client
- Casa do Conto
- Year
- 2009
- Construção
- Pedra Líquida
- Fotografia
- Fernando Guerra
- ↗ Casa do Conto, Archdaily Brasil